Yunqi Zhou

Yunqi Zhou, Chengjie Jiang, Chun Yuan et al.

With advances in satellite constellations, sensor technologies, and imaging pipelines, ultra-high-resolution (Ultra-HR) remote sensing imagery is becoming increasingly widespread. However, current remote sensing foundation models are ill-suited to such inputs: full-image encoding exhausts token and memory budgets, while resize-based preprocessing loses fine-grained and answer-critical details. In this context, guiding the model look where it matters before prediction becomes crucial. Therefore, we present ZoomSearch, a training-free, plug-and-play pipeline that decouples 'where to look' from 'how to answer' for Ultra-HR Remote Sensing Visual Question Answering (RS-VQA). ZoomSearch combines Adaptive Multi-Branch Zoom Search, which performs a hierarchical search over image patches to localize query-relevant regions, with Layout-Aware Patch Reassembly, which reorganizes the selected patches into a compact, layout-faithful canvas. We conduct comprehensive experiments on Ultra-HR RS-VQA benchmarks MME-RealWorld-RS and LRS-VQA, comparing against (i) strong general foundation models, (ii) remote sensing foundation models, (iii) Ultra-HR RS-VQA methods, and (iv) plug-and-play search-based VQA methods. When integrated with LLaVA-ov, ZoomSearch attains state-of-the-art accuracy across diverse tasks, improving the LLaVA-ov baseline by 26.3% on LRS-VQA and 114.8% on MME-RealWorld-RS. Meanwhile, it achieves much higher inference efficiency, outperforming prior search-based methods by 20%~44% in speed.

Chengjie Jiang, Yunqi Zhou, Jiafeng Yan et al.

Geospatial pixel reasoning aims to generate segmentation masks in remote sensing imagery directly from natural-language instructions. Most existing approaches follow a paradigm that fine-tunes multimodal large language models under supervision with dense pixel-level masks as ground truth. While effective within the training data distribution, this design suffers from two main drawbacks: (1) the high cost of large-scale dense mask annotation, and (2) the limited generalization capability of supervised fine-tuning in out-of-domain scenarios. To address these issues, we propose GRASP, a structured policy-learning framework that integrates a multimodal large language model with a pretrained segmentation model in a cascaded manner. To enhance generalization, we introduce PRIME, a training paradigm that replaces supervised fine-tuning with reinforcement learning to better align reasoning and grounding behaviors with task objectives. To reduce annotation costs, we design BoP-Rewards, which substitutes dense mask labels with bounding box and positive points. It further verifies outputs through two complementary signals: format, which constrains the reasoning and grounding structure to remain syntactically parsable, and accuracy, which evaluates the quality of predicted boxes and points. For evaluation, we train our method and all baselines on EarthReason and GeoPixInstruct, constructing an in-domain benchmark by merging their test sets. We further release GRASP-1k, a fully out-of-domain benchmark with reasoning-intensive queries, reasoning traces, and fine-grained masks. Experimental results demonstrate state-of-the-art (SOTA) in-domain performance and up to 54\% improvement in out-of-domain scenarios, confirming that reinforcement learning with cost-aware rewards provides a robust and scalable paradigm for geospatial pixel reasoning. All code and datasets will be released publicly.